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Well, that's just it, we don't actually have much phenotypic variation. For example, compare this:
to this:
or this:
Or this:
to this:
This is phenotypic variation:
And of course, you can't beat the birds of paradise when it comes to variation (though, strictly speaking, these are different species):
So, as I hope is clear from ...

Firstly, it's not true that you can't tell racial background from DNA. You most certainly can; it's quite possible to give fairly accurate phenotypic reconstruction of the features we choose as racial markers from DNA samples alone and also possible to identify real geographic ancestral populations from suitable markers.
The reason that human races aren't ...

Actually it is a very important question for laboratory animals (and, I imagine, endangered species) and was calculated to be 25 couples.
With any number of animals (including humans), there is always some inbreeding happening, but you can reduce it with the number of breeding pairs and careful pairing. When you get to 25 pairs (50 animals) and have ...

The first modern humans evolved about 200.000 years ago in Africa. When they lost their body hair (or at least most of it), they needed some other protection of their skin from the sun - otherwise they are prone to develop melanoma. Melanin is such a protection, and the rate of melanoma is much lower in dark skinned people.
There is also a nice correlation ...

I thought it was just that the other aneuploidies were fatal. They occur as often but miscarry earlier in the term therefore you don't see them. So basically there are only three that are viable 21,18 and the sex chromosome with a number of combinations: XO, XXY, XYY and XXX.
More information here:
...

"Blame" is a strong word. The human Y chromosome has only a few dozen protein-coding genes. One of the most important, for males anyway, is SRY, the sex-determining region. This is a transcription factor that is responsible for modulating the expression of other genes; those genes need not be on the Y chromosome. SOX9 for example is itself a ...

A gene being dominant does not necessarily imply the gene is also common.
An easy counterexample is Huntington's disease. The gene is dominant, and only one mutant allele of huntingtin would result in development of the disease. However, the allele prevalence of the mutant is low in the general population.
In the absence of a selective advantage of green ...

This difference would have the greatest impact on treatment for cancer, in which a treatment protocol is based on genes deleted, amplified, altered in the tumor vs the reference genome for that patient.
In terms of health risks based on SNP genotypes, the data are far from complete. Sure, some level of risk can be assigned to a variant (SNP), say at certain ...

I very much agree with bitwise's answer. I just want to point out that even in terms of nucleotide sequence there are some extremely conserved genes.
The most highly conserved are ribosomal RNA genes. The image below shows the conservation of 16S rRNAs from archaea, bacteria, and eukaryotes (eukaryotes do not have 16S in their cellular genome but the gene ...

The concept of a human/chimp hybrid is called a humanzee. No humanzees have ever been recorded despite the fact that sexual intercourse between humans and chimps has been recorded on several occasions. This suggests that male-human/female-chimpanzee is not capable of producing viable offspring, at the very least.
As to why, several reasons will contribute: ...

Hair color is not so simple as that. Most traits, especially those as complex as color, are controlled by many alleles at many loci. That's why there are different kinds of brown, blond, and red hair in the population. There is no "hair color gene." A fascinating paper came out a few years ago, identifying dozens of SNPs playing a role in hair and eye ...

"How come most animals never seem to evolve over millenia?"
The word "seem" in your question should not be disregarded. You seem to assume that cockroaches (or most animals as you say) did not change much the last tens or hundreds thousands of years. But what do you know about that? Have you actually reviewed many research that estimate the rate of ...

This is an interesting question, and there are a number hypotheses available to explain this phenomenon. The short answer (as far as I can say this after my literature search) is that we don't know the answer for sure. The long version follows below.
The main problem with all these hypothesis is that they have some valid point, but a definitive hasn't been ...

If you with 'humans' refer to our genus Homo (which is often the case), we do have multiple species, see wikipedia for an overview. The difference to many other organism groups is just that all species except Homo sapiens are extinct.
Also, taxonomic ranks below the species level - such as breed, subspecies, population and race - are very poorly definined ...

...would then be his offspring at risk? Why?
No. Generally speaking, fathers do not pass on their mtDNA (Mitochondrial DNA).
Why? Because the mitochondria present in oocytes (egg cell) is the mother's, as every oocyte directly inherits the mother's mitochondria when they are made in the reproductive organs. The mitochondria that the sperm from the ...

Depends on what you mean by unchanged. If you mean a gene that maintained the same nucleotide sequence, then the answer is no.
If you meant a gene that descends from a very ancient gene, i.e. one can find orthologs in very distant species, then the answer is yes. Many of the basic molecular systems are relatively conserved, including several metabolic paths ...

That would be hard to say because really beneficial mutations become well distributed through the genome. Basically the differences between us and chimpanzees are a catalog of all the beneficial (or completely neutral) mutations since the ~4.7 M years since we diverged from each other.
Separating them from changes which have no special effect would be ...

I'm not sure I buy your premise: firstly, the degree and form of male-female differentiation in social roles has varied widely across time and culture in human history so I doubt it forms a uniform evolutionary driver such as you describe. Secondly, the degree of male-female differentiation appears to me to be much greater in species such as gorillas, lions ...

There are many different variants of O (all loss-of-function) indicating that this mutation has arisen many times in the human population. The prevalence of O is indeed taken as evidence of balancing selection. Various pathogens use the A or B antigens as receptors. The cited paper presents evidence about the phylogeny of the ABO gene in human populations ...

Just continue scrolling down wikipedia: there are also listed two examples of beneficial mutations: the one conferring HIV resistance, and the one conferring malaria resistance.
Note that 'beneficial' is relative. The mutation associated to malaria resistance is actually causing sickle cell disease.

The processes that control the germline of metazoans (multicellular animals) are highly regulated compared to single cell bacteria and eukaryotes as well as plants.
At this point there are no clear stories of gene transfer into a complex animal, though there are some for plants:
"animals and fungi seem to be largely unaffected, with a few exceptions, ...

A major limiting factor in such an exercise is the complexity of the biological process under question (eye colour etc.,) and thus, our nascent understanding of these. What I mean is that there is not a single gene that determines a given characteristic, rather it is the complex interaction of a set of genes in different conditions responding to ...

Meiosis is the type of cell division responsible for the diversification of genetic material among egg and sperm cells. The diversity comes primarily from crossing over (Prophase I) and the cell divisions (Telophase I & II) later on in the process.
Meiosis begins with one diploid cell containing two copies of each
chromosome—one from the organism's ...

Another list of simple human traits can be found on the Western Kentucky University site.
I will ask also AB0 and Rh Blood Groups, you can use this also to check associations with other genotypes/phenotypes, see this stackexchange question
If you are going to sequence also the mitochondrial DNA, you may want to reflect on questions to ask also about their ...

Gene frequencies (frequencies of each allele at a given loci) in populations are affected by many things divided in to systematic and dispersive processes. Systematic process (migration, mutation, selection) affect gene frequencies in an often quite predictable manner and strength. Dispersive process (Random drift, differentiation between sub-populations, ...

Bone Marrow transplants are extensively matched in order to prevent rejection. Current matching methodology is HLA matching: Stanford Children's Hospital Guidelines
How are a donor and recipient matched?
Matching involves typing human leukocyte antigen (HLA) tissue. The antigens on the surface of these special white blood cells determine the genetic ...

Dawkins is overgeneralizing. Genetic distance is a fairly new field, and a heated topic, since your answer depends upon which genes you are comparing. If you picked ONLY strongly-conserved genes for your genetic distance comparison, then you'd find that humans, bonobos, dogs, mice, mosquitos, shrimp, and bakers' yeast are all equally distant (and that the ...

According to wikipedia, "comparisons between known skin pigmentation genes in chimpanzees and modern Africans show that dark skin evolved along with the loss of body hair about 1.2 million years ago and is the ancestral state of all humans." This is several million years after after the time estimated for the last common human-chimpanzee ancestor, but at ...